Dmitri Shostakovich

• 1. Introduction

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  Dmitri Shostakovich stood backstage at the Leningrad opera house on the 26th of January 1936, white as a sheet, waiting to take his bow. Joseph Stalin had just walked out of the auditorium without speaking to anyone. The next morning, Pravda published an editorial titled "Muddle Instead of Music", denouncing Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District as a "deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds... that quacks, hoots, pants and gasps". Shostakovich was 29 years old and, until that moment, one of the most celebrated composers in the Soviet Union.

  What followed was a life lived under extraordinary pressure: two formal government denunciations, a circle of friends and colleagues killed in the purges, forced public apologies, and music written, as he would later say, "for the desk drawer". Yet over 15 symphonies and 15 string quartets, Shostakovich built a body of work that David Fanning, writing in Grove's Dictionary, called "a musical language of colossal emotional power". How a composer survives a state that can end a career with a single editorial, and what that survival costs, is at the heart of this story.

• 2. A Saint Petersburg Childhood

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  Shostakovich was born on Podolskaya Street in Saint Petersburg, and the city's intellectual life ran deep in his family's roots. His father, Dmitri Boleslavovich, had studied physics and mathematics at Saint Petersburg State University, graduating in 1899, and later worked as an engineer under Dmitri Mendeleev at the Bureau of Weights and Measures. His paternal great-grandfather, a Polish revolutionary who had taken part in the January Uprising of 1863-1864, was exiled to Narym in 1866 and eventually became a successful banker in Irkutsk, which is how the family's Siberian branch began.

  The future composer showed a striking musical memory almost from the start of his lessons. When his mother taught him piano from age 9, he would get caught pretending to read the score while actually reproducing what she had played from memory at the previous session. By the time he was 13, in 1919, he had been admitted to the Petrograd Conservatory, then run by Alexander Glazunov, who followed his progress closely. There he studied piano, composition, and counterpoint, and in 1925 enrolled in the conducting classes of Nikolai Malko. A classmate's account of Shostakovich at the podium captures something essential: he focused entirely on tempi and dynamics, drawing striking contrasts between the quiet introduction and the vigorous first theme, producing what the classmate called "discoveries of an improvised order, born from an intuitively refined understanding".

  His graduation piece, the First Symphony, was written when he was 19. On the 12th of May 1926, Malko conducted its premiere with the Leningrad Philharmonic; the audience demanded an encore of the scherzo. Shostakovich would celebrate that date every year for the rest of his life.

• 3. Piano, Performance, and Rivalry

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  After graduation, Shostakovich pursued a dual career, but his dry keyboard style drew criticism, and he maintained a heavy performance schedule only until 1930. His high-water mark as a performer came in January 1927 at the inaugural International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, where he competed alongside Soviet colleagues including Lev Oborin, Grigory Ginzburg, and Josif Shvarts.

  The preparation alone was remarkable. One witness recalled that Shostakovich locked himself away at home for three weeks, practicing for hours at a time, postponing his composing entirely and giving up theatre visits and friends. Observers described his playing as "anti-sentimental", rejecting rubato and extreme dynamic contrasts in a way one listener said was unlike anything he had ever heard. Another called it "profound and lacking any salon-like mannerisms".

  Shostakovich was struck by appendicitis on the opening day of the competition, but recovered in time to perform on the 27th of January. He reached the final round, but Oborin was declared the winner. Shostakovich received only a diploma. By April, recovering from his appendectomy in a Moscow hospital, he was already questioning whether a performing career was worth pursuing: "To be a pianist who is worse than Szpinalski, Etkin, Ginzburg, and Bryushkov is not worth it," he wrote. He never won a prize at the competition, but the visit to Berlin that followed opened a more consequential door. Bruno Walter, so struck by the First Symphony, conducted its first performance outside Russia that same year. Leopold Stokowski led the American premiere in Philadelphia the following year and also made the work's first recording.

• 4. Lady Macbeth and the Pravda Attack

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  The opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District had its first performance in 1934 and was initially praised at the highest levels, described in official Soviet rhetoric as a work that "could have been written only by a Soviet composer brought up in the best tradition of Soviet culture". On the 26th of January 1936, Stalin attended a performance accompanied by Vyacheslav Molotov, Andrei Zhdanov, and Anastas Mikoyan. They left without a word.

  Shostakovich had been warned in advance by a friend to cancel a concert tour in Arkhangelsk in order to be present at that performance. He heard about the Pravda editorial on the 28th of January, while he was still in Arkhangelsk. From there, he instructed his friend Isaac Glikman to subscribe to a clipping service so he could track the fallout. Soviet music critics who had praised the opera were forced to recant publicly, admitting they had "failed to detect the shortcomings of Lady Macbeth as pointed out by Pravda". One exception was Shostakovich's close friend Ivan Sollertinsky, who walked into a composers' meeting called to denounce the opera and praised it instead.

  On the 6th of February, Pravda attacked again, this time targeting Shostakovich's light comic ballet The Limpid Stream. His monthly income fell from as much as 12,000 rubles to as little as 2,000. His commissions and concert appearances dried up. Four years later, when the writer Isaac Babel was under arrest, he told interrogators that "it was common ground for us to proclaim the genius of the slighted Shostakovich". The Great Purge that began that year would kill several of Shostakovich's closest friends and relatives, including Marshal Tukhachevsky, who had once sent a car to take him to a concert, executed on the 12th of June 1937.

• 5. The Fifth Symphony's Double Meaning

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  Shostakovich's response to his denunciation arrived on the 21st of November 1937, when the Fifth Symphony premiered in Leningrad. The work was musically more conservative than his recent output. It was a phenomenal success. Many in the audience were brought to tears.

  The authorities and critics who had attacked him now claimed he had learned from his mistakes and become a true Soviet artist. Under Shostakovich's name, a newspaper article characterized the Fifth as "A Soviet artist's creative response to just criticism". The composer Dmitry Kabalevsky, who had previously disassociated himself from Shostakovich, praised it publicly and congratulated him for not having given in to his "erroneous" old ways. What the audience actually understood, and what Shostakovich himself later suggested in his disputed memoir Testimony, is a different question: "I'll never believe that a man who understood nothing could feel the Fifth Symphony. Of course they understood, they understood what was happening around them and they understood what the Fifth was about".

  The Tenth Symphony, written after Stalin's death in 1953, followed a similar pattern of layered meaning. Its savage second movement is described in Testimony as a musical portrait of Stalin. The work is also laced with musical codes: the DSCH motif, Shostakovich's own musical monogram, and the Elmira motif, a reference to Elmira Nazirova, a pianist and composer who had studied under him. Scholars still debate the full meaning of those codes. What is certain is that by 1937, Shostakovich had begun to develop a kind of compositional double language, one face turned toward the state, another toward those who could hear what lay beneath.

• 6. War, Siege, and the Seventh

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  When Germany and the Soviet Union went to war in 1941, Shostakovich tried to enlist in the military but was turned away because of his poor eyesight. He joined the Leningrad Conservatory's firefighter brigade instead and delivered a radio broadcast. The photograph that accompanied it was published across the country.

  He began writing the Seventh Symphony while Leningrad was under siege, completing the first three movements in the city before being evacuated with his family to Kuybyshev, now Samara, where he finished the work on the 27th of December 1941. In a radio address on the 17th of September 1941, he said he had continued working to show that everyone had a "soldier's duty" to ensure life went on. The symphony was premiered by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra in Kuibyshev on the 29th of March 1942, then performed in London in June 1942 and in the United States in July 1942. It reached Leningrad in August 1942, while the city was still under siege. Conductor Karl Eliasberg found the city's orchestra had only 14 musicians remaining and had to recruit anyone who could play an instrument.

  The Eighth Symphony, completed after the family moved to Moscow in spring 1943, puzzled both Soviet authorities and Western audiences. Its tragic tone seemed wrong for the moment. The Western press briefly nicknamed it the "Stalingrad Symphony". Olin Downes expressed disappointment; Carlos Chavez, who had conducted its Mexican premiere, praised it highly. The contrast captures the persistent uncertainty around Shostakovich: people kept expecting his music to say something simple, and it never did.

• 7. Joining the Party

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  1960 brought one of the most contested moments in Shostakovich's life. The Soviet government wanted to appoint him Chairman of the RSFSR Union of Composers, and the post required Party membership. Nikita Khrushchev, then First Secretary, was reaching out to the intelligentsia. Shostakovich joined the Communist Party.

  Interpretations of the decision have never settled. His son Maxim recalled that the event reduced him to tears, and that Shostakovich later told his wife Irina he had been blackmailed. Lev Lebedinsky said the composer was suicidal around this time. Others have read it as a pragmatic accommodation under a less repressive regime than Stalin's. What followed was the Eighth String Quartet, composed in only three days. Shostakovich subtitled it "To the victims of fascism and war" and told Glikman: "I started thinking that if some day I die, nobody is likely to write a work in memory of me, so I had better write one myself". The quartet is dense with self-quotation, including the DSCH motif and material from Lady Macbeth, the First Symphony, the Second Piano Trio, and the First Cello Sonata.

  He married his third wife, Irina Supinskaya, in 1962. In a letter to Glikman he noted: "her only defect is that she is 27 years old. In all other respects she is splendid: clever, cheerful, straightforward and very likeable". According to the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, who knew the couple well, it was with Irina that Shostakovich finally found domestic peace, and that she prolonged his life by several years. That same year, his Thirteenth Symphony set poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the first of which memorialized the Jews massacred by Nazis at Babi Yar. After the premiere, Yevtushenko was pressured to add a stanza noting that Russians and Ukrainians had also died there alongside the Jews.

• 8. The Debate That Outlived Him

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  Shostakovich was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1973. His last completed work was his Viola Sonata, first performed officially on the 1st of October 1975. He died on the 9th of August 1975 at the Moscow Central Clinical Hospital and was interred in Novodevichy Cemetery.

  The argument about what his music actually meant began in earnest four years after his death, when Solomon Volkov published Testimony in 1979, claiming it was based on memoirs the composer had dictated to him. The book argued that many works contained coded anti-government messages, placing Shostakovich in a tradition of Russian artists who had outwitted censorship going back to Pushkin. Shostakovich's son Maxim initially said in 1981 that the book was not his father's work, but has spoken more favorably about Volkov and Testimony since the Soviet regime fell in 1991. Musicologist Laurel Fay's 2002 article "Volkov's Testimony reconsidered" showed that the only pages Shostakovich had personally signed were word-for-word reproductions of earlier interviews. Volkov's supporters point out that at least some signed pages contain genuinely controversial material.

  The disagreement cuts to something that cannot now be resolved: whether a composer working under censorship can speak honestly in music when he cannot speak honestly in words, and whether listeners can reliably decode that speech. William Walton described Shostakovich as "the greatest composer of the 20th century". Pierre Boulez dismissed his music as "the second, or even third pressing of Mahler". The gap between those two verdicts is itself a measure of how much remains disputed. In 2004, musicologist Olga Digonskaya discovered around 300 pages of unknown or partially known manuscripts in Shostakovich's hand at the Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow, including sketches for the unfinished 1932 opera Orango, eventually orchestrated by Gerard McBurney and premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen in December 2011. The archive is still being worked through.